New Sega Themepark under Construction ...in Dubai

We all know about Segas theme park ventures over the years, including the still running Joypolis in Japan, Gameworks in America and the no longer existing Sega World parks in London and Australia. Well it looks like Sega hasn't given up on building brand new parks as they are now construing one called "Sega Republic" in a huge Mall in Dubai, of all places. Sonic Retro has the info:

"SEGA Republic, is a two-level, 76,000 square feet indoor theme park, featuring a diverse line-up of rides and amusements. It will be the first of its kind in the region, and will serve as a benchmark for future SEGA indoor theme park developments across the Middle East and North Africa region and the Indian Subcontinent. With zones themed to reflect the experiences on offer, from the thrill of the ‘Speed Zone’, the active ‘Sports Zone’, the major rides and simulators, and huge redemption zone."

Concept art of the 'Sonic Hopper'

"SEGA Republic offers visitors of all ages the opportunity to discover the worlds they wish to explore through a variety of themed zones: Wild Adventure Zone, Speed Zone, Cyberpop Zone, Sports Zone and the Redemption Zone. Near the entry, is ‘Sonic Hopper’ (pictured) a drop tower offering thrills for all age groups in a family-free-fall experience. The ‘Wild Adventure’ zone includes motion simulated rides with an extreme adventure theme such as ‘Wild Wing’ that allows visitors to experience a dramatic aerial tour of the countryside or also explore nature up-close on ‘Wild Jungle’. SEGA Republic® also features ‘Spin Gear’, a full-scale indoor horizontal spinning-coaster offering several surprise twists and turns. In the Sports Zone, visitors can enjoy games and rides based on real-world sports, such as the signature attraction, ‘Halfpipe Canyon’."

"Another large attraction at the SEGA Republic is the ‘Redemption Zone’, a themed arcade and gaming zone, where tickets can be won and redeemed for a large range of merchandise. SEGA Republic at The Dubai Mall is a fully-themed indoor environment and will be one of the largest of its kind in the region. From the roller coaster, to the ride simulators, and arcade games, from its redemption activities to the physical sports games, SEGA Republic will thrill all its visitors."

Along with this info, photos of the park currently in construction can be seen over at this thread on Theme Park Review. One photo shows a Robotnik styled coaster cart. All this park needs now is some bottomless pits and they could call it "Eggman land".

S.T.C Streets of Rage Comic Online

One thing I quite enjoyed about Sonic the Comic in it's early days was how there was stories based on a whole slew of Sega's most popular games at the time (and even a few based on third-party games from EA and Konami). One of the earliest to appear in Issue 7 was Streets of Rage, which went on to receive a three stories (one for each game I presume) and even a book collection.

This website called Geekenvy has some great Sega related articles and has also uploaded scans of the first Street of Rage story in all of its glory, written by Mark Miller and Illustrated by Peter Richardson. Considering the game's simplistic story and the fact that they could only get away with so much in a children's comic, they did a quality job on this.

If you want to download any of the S.T.C comics in their entirety, there is a complete archive over at a website called Tails.Kicks.Ass.net, though you have to sign up to download anything.

Meanwhile at the Junkyards..

As you may now I write for a few other blogs other than this one. Ive been writing for the Dreamcast Junkyard for a good few years now and recently I joined the team other at the Saturn Junkyard too. This is nothing more than a plug for some articles I wrote recently at both of those in case you missed them, as they do relate to collecting Sega stuff too.

Firstly at the Saturn Junkyard as my first article for the blog, here's a whole bunch of photos of my Saturn collection. I've been buying a lot for this system lately since i got myself a white Japanese Saturn and the 4MB RAM cart that lets you play all those brillaint Capcom fighters. It far more up to date than this photo from a while back, anyway.

Then at the Dreamcast Junkyard I've displayed a bunch of photos of the Segagaga box set I recently got in the post, which contains a nice pin set of all the console logos and a rather sweet t-shirt design. The game is about as much Sega fan service as you'll ever see in one place. I'll be writing more about the game there soon.

Now you know why most posts around here end up being about Sonic merchandise!

Some odd Commercials to kill some brain cells

Can't say I've seen these before, but the first video above popped up on Destructoid and it's advertising the Mega Drive to the public of India, starring a rather bizarrely voiced Sonic invading a kid's TV to BLOW HIM AWAY with Sega. Sega Who? WRONG ANSWER.



Next up is a commercial for Sonic Spaghetti (of all things) and what could of possibly of been one of Sega's many rejected mega Drive add on ideas: a food can holder thing that transports food from the screen into your gob. Yeah..



Speaking of Sonic junk food, here is what I presume is just a short snippit of a commercial for Sonic 3 life savers, that or it's the shortest most confusing commercial ever. Blink and you'll miss it, which is hardly a bad thing as when you do see it you might not be able to sleep tonight.



Darn it, as I'm writing this article I keep finding more oddities I haven't seen before. Here's one for one of those terrible Sonic Tiger handhelds. I had a few of these, unfortunately. They were barely playable and made horrid noises. Sega put there name on a whole slew of these, from After Burner to Virtua Fighter and even a Virtua Cop one that had a little gun you point at it's screen. Some were slightly better than others, but that's not saying much. Still, they're quite collectable now so i might write an article about them one day.

No, really, Japan still likes Sega Pt. 2

One thing I didn’t mention in the previous article is there is actually more than one Sega Joypolis. I believe nowadays there are only three left open, but there used to be more. We actually encountered one of other the open ones elsewhere in our travels in the city Okayama. However, we didn’t give it a visit unfortunately due to our time in Okayama being cut short (thanks to a certain “closed” hostel, but I won’t get in to that).

So other than the Joypolis centres, what kind of Sega stuff did Japan hold? Well, actually, not all that much. However, there is a ridiculously prevalent chain of ‘Club Sega’ arcades throughout the entire country. Occasionally, they are titled ‘Sega Park’ or ‘Sega World’, but ‘Club Sega’ was definitely the more common of these titles. Usually, these were just your average Japanese arcade – dark, incredibly noisy, filled with smoke, weird but spectacular arcade machines and a bunch of angry looking people playing fighting games with ridiculous precision. Oh and lots of gambling. And I mean lots.

^ If you’re a nerd and find yourself in Tokyo, it is almost unquestionable that at some point you’ll end up in Akihabara, Tokyo’s ‘Electric Town’. This isn’t far from the station at all. I'm also a bad photographer.

Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of Club Sega’s dotted around Japan, which we stumbled upon frequently. However, most of them were pretty uncharacteristic. However, there was a slightly more unique one I stumbled upon in Fukuoka.

More after the jump..

Sega Fanart Showcase: Badniks

While I'm in a badnik appreciation mood, it's about time i did another one of these fan art showcase things. The robot enemies in the classic games are one of the most underrated elements of the Sonic series, particularly now as Sega tend to only design about 4 robots for each game used in every single stage, whereas the old games had badniks unique to every zone. Sega really missed the boat in making the badniks a highly marketable part of the franchise as they were like the Pokemon of their time in a way, sort of. Anyway, here's to the metallic animals everyone loved to crash into! A lot of the fan art I found are 3d renders.

Attack! By Kamladolly

More after the jump..

The Sonic & Knuckles Mini Figures

You've seen most of these little Sonic toys scattered about in many of my photos here before, but I almost forgot that I have a bunch more of them boxed up in the loft, so I decided to dig them out and snap some photos of them. They are easily one of my favorite sets of Sonic toys from my childhood: I recall having two of all of them at one stage: these ones boxed to store away and another set to play with, and they were awesome. I don't even think Japan ever got a set with as many different characters in it as this, yet they were released near the tail end of the Sonic boom of '92-'94.

They were produced by Tomy, who had previously released quite a lot of Sonic toys in England like the Pinball machine, the Marble Quest tower thing, a remote control car, some spinning discs thing called the Cyclone and lot's more. sadly I don't own a lot of those anymore before they were bulky and got played to death, the Cyclone in particular of mine got wreaked. While those toys were mostly found in catalogs and department stores this figure set was quite hard to hunt down from my memory, eventually finding them in a small toy shop. I don't believe you see these very often anymore except four of the figures were re-released in a little Sega branded box-set that pops up on Ebay every so often (Smindas has them in his collection I believe).

Here's one of the boxes, of which I have 3 out of a total of 5, each containing 4 figures, which were always two characters and two badniks. The box is quite snazzy, matching that iconic logo that adorned the box of the game. Makes a chnage from the usual checkered designs, anyway.

More after the jump..

Hey Smindas! I've found your Knuckles clock!

Well lookie what I found by pure accident why browsing the net, it's none other than a blog post about a set of Japanese 'SegaSonic' clocks which include the Knuckles one that Smindas has as part of his collection. There is also clocks of Sonic, Tails, Amy Rose and Robotnik and they're all rather snazzy. Even the packaging has a hand drawn quality to it. They were apparently found on the Yahoo Japan auction site back in August. Maybe I should have a browse there sometime. I think iI would actually be willing to trade a bunch of my old British Sonic merchindise for some of the wonderful early 90's Japanese stuff.

The art on the box looks like it came directly from some of the early concept art. Wow.

Source (with more close up photos): Tina @ Animeish